Experts

Guian McKee

Fast Facts

Expertise on Health Care Policy, Medicare, Medicaid, Urban Policy, the War on Poverty, the Great Society, Lyndon Johnson, John F. Kennedy

Areas Of Expertise

Health

Law and Justice

Race and Racism

Social Issues

Guian McKee is an associate professor in presidential studies at the Miller Center. He received a Ph.D. in American history at the University of California, Berkeley in May 2002, and he is the author of The Problem of Jobs: Liberalism, Race, and Deindustrialization in Philadelphia, published in November 2008 by the University of Chicago Press. At the Miller Center, McKee works extensively with the Presidential Recordings Program.

McKee’s research focuses on how federal policy, especially in the executive branch, plays out at the local level in American communities. He has written extensively about urban policy, including a book that explored the connections between local and federal economic, urban renewal, and antipoverty policies in Philadelphia between the 1950s and the 1980s. This project led to his extensive work on the Lyndon Johnson White House recordings focused on the War on Poverty, as well as on the wider development of the Great Society.

He is currently working on a book project that examines the rise of the health care economy in American cities after World War II, focusing on the development of hospitals and academic medical centers as critical but problematic urban economic anchors as well as drivers of cost in the larger health care system. This project builds on his earlier work by connecting social, political, and economic developments in specific places (Baltimore provides a core case study for the book) with larger policy choices, especially those made by presidents (drawing in particular on the Center’s Presidential Oral Histories). His work offers an alternative narrative of health care policy history – and of health care reform – by focusing on the consequences of health care spending.

As part of the Miller Center’s Presidential Recordings Program, McKee edited Volumes 6 and 7 of The Presidential Recordings of Lyndon B. Johnson. These volumes cover the period from mid-April to mid-June 1964, during which the Johnson administration lobbied for passage of the Civil Rights and Economic Opportunity Acts and struggled with increasing difficulties in Southeast Asia. He is also the editor of a thematic volume that includes all of Johnson’s recorded conversations about the War on Poverty. This project is currently being published digitally by the University of Virginia Press through its Rotunda electronic imprint.

He has published articles in the Journal of Urban History, Journal of Policy History, Journal of Planning History, the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco’s Community Development Investment Center, the Washington Post’s “Monkey Cage” blog, the Boston Globe, and U.S. News and World Report. In 2007, he delivered the keynote address at the conference "In the Shadow of the Great Society: American Politics, Culture and Society Since 1964," hosted by the Rothermere American Institute and the American History Research Seminar, University of Oxford, U.K.

Guian McKee (editor)

Guian McKee (editor)

Guian McKee News Feed

Fifty years ago, at about 6 p.m. on April 4, 1968, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated while standing on the second-floor balcony of his hotel room in Memphis, Tennessee. About an hour later, President Lyndon B. Johnson, who was just wrapping up a White House meeting with the governor of Georgia and the president of Coca-Cola, learned that the iconic civil rights leader had been killed. Tapes at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center can help the public piece together exactly what Johnson did in the ensuing days.

The Miller Center's Guian McKee said people demonstrate because they feel their representatives in government are not perceiving their concerns or taking action to address the issues, as well as “to build support for their cause and to make people feel that they are not alone in having these concerns in feeling alienated.” He said the anti-gun violence student protests are deeply rooted.

UVA’s Miller Center of Public Policy has just released an index to Lyndon Johnson’s private White House Tapes on the 50th anniversary of America’s trouble year of 1968, that ended with his decision not to seek re-election, and reveals President Trump is not the first President to attack the press. The Miller Center’s Guian McKee said, “Presidential suspicion of the media goes way back, really probably to the beginning of the institution.”

The 10 most important modern presidential speeches selected by scholars at the Miller Center—a nonpartisan affiliate of the University of Virginia that specializes in presidential scholarship—and professors from other universities, as well.